Lincicome: US vs. the world? In more ways than one
All at once it is us, meaning US, against the world: in Italy, in spring training, in basketball, in soccer, a double hand full of challenges packed together like caramel corn, although I guess in Tuscany it would be more like panforte.
What with our present unhappy standing in the world, redemption is available. Our skaters and pitchers and shooters and kickers have a chance to put us back on top of the hill, or behind the 3-point line, where we belong.
The Winter Olympics are ongoing, not our best competition, handicapped as we are by not skiing to work as apparently everyone in Scandinavia does, or ice skating down the street as is common in Amsterdam.
Medal standings are regrettably kept and totaled each day, where we find ourselves behind Norway and Italy and turtleneck to turtleneck with France and Germany.
The usual star of the Games is the female figure skater, the favorite being from Georgia, the country, not the state, although homegrowns named Amber and Isabeau are in with a chance.
There is the likely showdown in men’s hockey between US and Canada, somehow now loaded with political import. Thank goodness the American women are removing doubt and any odd Canadian in their way.
Back here, that is to say, in Los Angeles, basketball has also found a way to play sports war.
This very weekend, the NBA has decided to divide its all-stars into two American teams, the Stars and the Stripes — one young, one old — to each take a shot at assorted passport holders from France, Serbia and points east, a concession to international clutter.
Other than the enduring LeBron, basketball seems now to belong to guys named Luka and Nikola, far removed from Magic, Larry and Michael. Nevertheless, go Stars, or go Stripes, whichever applies.
Interrupting spring training will be the World Baseball Classic, a chance for Shohei Ohtani to again remind the world that Japan — three consecutive titles — owns America’s pastime. Of the 20 teams entered, Italy is there should we need to get even for the halfpipe.
Whereas we know that any baseball series that has the word “world” in front of it belongs usually to New York or to Los Angeles, adding the words “baseball” and “classic” seems so much padding, both artificial and deceptive.
We know what we know, and until the Cubs play the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks for all the sushi, everything else is just a sideshow.
Later in the summer, the World Cup arrives in this hemisphere, meaning not only US but Mexico and Canada, with 48 national entities, including cruise ship ports and former shooting war opponents. My personal interest is getting even for bad shellfish in Curacao.
After the Olympics the World Cup is the most legitimate of all international competitions, but unforgivably foreign. The US has never finished higher than the semi-finals, back in 1930. We have been too embarrassed to ever do better.
Our odds are 50-1 to 80-1 to win the World Cup, being kindly referred to as “long-shot outsiders.”
Why a soccer tournament is in the United States is clearly economical, not athletical. As defective as we may be playing a game without using our hands, we do not begrudge those who do.
The persistent insistence that we will become a soccer nation is boosted by the occasional arrival of world celebrities, considering the world to be any place on which we have a tariff. From Pele to Beckham to Messi, they come for the money and, what’s more, we give it to them.
We are sort of like coat check stations for the usual suspects — Brazil, Spain, France, Argentina and so on, those places where all of this is taken seriously.
In spite of posturing here and threats there, hints that nations may boycott the World Cup, no more than a few boos are likely, and we have become used to those.
World soccer knows where the money is and will find US hospitable, assured that we have no chance of winning.
Still, in all cases, hope abides.